The largest US newspaper publisher accuses Google of monopoly in the advertising market

The American company Gannett Co., which publishes more than 100 federal and regional newspapers in the United States (USA Today, Detroit Free Press, The Indianapolis Star and others), filed a lawsuit in New York lawsuit against the Internet corporation Google and its parent company Alphabet. The largest US newspaper publisher accuses Google of monopolizing the digital advertising market, which harms fair competition and causes material damage to publishers.

“Google controls 90% of the publisher content server market, which publishers use to sell ad space,” says Gannett. “Google also controls more than 60% of the ad exchange market (platforms for buying and selling ad spaces and spaces across different ad networks.— “b”), which are auctioned between advertisers who offer their own terms for the use of advertising space on publishers’ sites … News content publishers are very dependent on digital advertising revenue. These revenues are necessary for them to work smoothly and provide content to our society in a timely manner. But Google’s practices are having a negative impact that hurts not only publishers’ bottom line, but also forces them to cut back on local news. Without fair and fair competition in the digital advertising market, publishers will not be able to invest in maintaining and growing their newsrooms.”

Gannett is asking the court to find Google guilty of violating US antitrust laws, stop such violations, determine the amount of damage caused by Gannett and compensate for it.

In his statement to the newspaper USA Today Google denies the allegations. “These claims are simply not true,” said Dan Taylor, vice president of Google Ads. “Publishers have many options for monetizing ad technology. In fact, Gannett itself uses several dozen competing advertising services, one of which is Google Ad Manager. And when publishers choose Google services, they keep the lion’s share of the revenue. We will show in court how publishers benefit from our advertising services, which help them fund content creation.”

Evgeniy Khvostik